The Music

The Hammig Quartet makes a welcome return to the Colour House. By coincidence both
pieces they play are both the fifteenth and the last of their respective composers’
quartets. The six movements of the Shostakovich are touchingly full of deep introspection,
typical of an artist who was bullied throughout his life by the Soviet authorities.
By contrast the Schubert is one of the largest-scale and most impressive string quartets
ever written - a broad and profound first movement, a hauntingly beautiful second,
a quicksilver scherzo and a thrilling tarantella finale. If you don’t know this marvellous
work - and indeed if you do - you have a great treat in store.

Sunday January 27th 7.30pm

Sunday February 24th 7.30pm

Sunday March 31st 7.30pm

The Hammig Quartet

Shostakovich:

String Quartet No.15 in E flat minor Op.144

Schubert:

String Quartet No. 15 in G major D.887

Handel

We haven’t forgotten Rebecca’s last Colour House performance in January two years
ago, a delightful song recital with the outstanding young soprano Nazan Fikret. Now
she partners two more rising stars in songs, arias and duets by composers including
Schubert, Puccini, and the rarely heard Austrian romantic Joseph Marx, who wrote
over 150 remarkable lieder.

Coincidences, when they come, often come in pairs - in this recital too both sonatas
are their composers’ second, and both share the same key! Robert’s annual visits
here are always events of fine musicianship and dazzling virtuosity, and our mouths
are watering for this one. Schumann famously described Chopin’s remarkable second
sonata as “four of his maddest children under the same roof” - its brief, whirling
moto perpetuo finale in particular must have baffled contemporary audiences, and
the third movement is the celebrated march, which has become as universally known
and used at funerals as that by Mendelssohn for weddings. Rachmaninov’s superb sonata
has all the excitement and romantic passion we know from his concertos, and, as you’d
expect from a composer who was the greatest pianist of his day, is just as fiendishly
difficult to play.